11 Foods Ohioans Grew Up Eating That the Rest of America Has Never Heard Of

Readers of an Ohio newspaper once voted a deep-fried ball of sauerkraut their city’s official food.

Akron, naturally.

Foods like that never made it past the state line, so the names on a restaurant menu in Ohio stop visitors cold.

These are the foods Ohioans grew up eating that the rest of America has never heard of.

1. Goetta

Ask for goetta outside Ohio, and you’ll get a blank look.

Cincinnati families have eaten it for breakfast for generations, and the recipe came over with German immigrants from Westphalia and Hanover.

Goetta is ground pork, sometimes pork and beef, simmered with steel-cut oats, onions, bay leaf, and rosemary until the whole pot thickens.

You pour it into a loaf pan, chill it overnight, slice it, and fry the slices in butter until the edges turn crisp.

Glier’s turns out more than two million pounds a year, and nearly all of it stays inside Greater Cincinnati.

Every summer, crowds cross the river to Newport for two weekends of Goettafest, thrown in honor of a sausage few people outside the region can pronounce.

2. Barberton Fried Chicken

Barberton sits southwest of Akron, and it calls itself the Chicken Capital of the World.

Serbian immigrants Mike and Smilka Topalsky started selling their family’s fried chicken at Belgrade Gardens in 1933.

The chicken cooks in lard at a lower temperature than most cooks would use, and for longer.

Nobody rushes it.

A Barberton chicken dinner lands as four things on one plate: The chicken, hand-cut French fries, vinegar slaw, and a scoop of hot rice, which is stewed tomatoes and rice cooked down with hot peppers.

You don’t order the sides because they arrive with the chicken.

The Akron RubberDucks played a 2024 home game as the Barberton Fried Chicken and Hot Rice, hats and all.

3. Polish Boy

Cleveland’s contribution to the American sandwich starts with a smoked kielbasa in a hot dog bun.

Then comes a pile of French fries, a scoop of coleslaw, and enough barbecue sauce to run down your wrist.

That’s a Polish Boy.

Eastern European butchers and Black pitmasters who moved north during the Great Migration ended up on the same Cleveland blocks, and the sandwich came out of that.

Virgil Whitmore Sr. gets the credit for making it famous, and Whitmore’s Bar-B-Q in Warrensville Heights has sold them since the 1970s, 500 to 1,000 a week.

You eat it standing over the container it came in, and you use both hands.

4. Sauerkraut Balls

Akron cooks drain sauerkraut, work it together with ground meat and seasoning, roll the mix into balls, bread them, and drop them in the fryer.

Every family guards a slightly different version of sauerkraut balls, though the recipe from the old Bavarian Haus leaned on ground ham, minced onion, garlic, and cayenne.

Akron Beacon Journal readers once voted the sauerkraut ball the city’s official food.

At a wedding reception, somebody’s aunt refills the tray all night.

Outsiders hear sauerkraut and flinch.

Then they eat four.

5. City Chicken

The meat case in a Northeast Ohio grocery store carries packages labeled city chicken.

There’s no chicken in it.

City chicken is cubes of pork, sometimes pork and veal, pressed onto a wooden skewer, breaded, browned in a pan, and finished in the oven.

It goes back to the Depression, when chicken cost more than pork, so cooks built a stand-in out of what they could afford.

The name stuck.

Cleveland chef Michael Symon has pointed out that no nationality owned city chicken because every family in town made it.

The map runs from Northeast Ohio over to Pittsburgh and into parts of Michigan, and it stops there.

6. Johnny Marzetti

Ohio school cafeterias ran on Johnny Marzetti for decades.

It’s ground beef, egg noodles, tomatoes, and cheese baked in one pan, and no two families made it the same way.

A recipe under that name ran in the Columbus Dispatch back in 1916.

Nobody knows who Johnny was.

The Marzetti company checked its own records and found no link between the dish and the family’s Columbus restaurant.

The 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act pushed it off many lunch menus, and few Ohio schools serve it now.

7. Brier Hill Pizza

Youngstown's own pizza carries red sauce, sweet red and green bell peppers, and a heavy dusting of grated Romano cheese.

No mozzarella.

Italian families in the Brier Hill neighborhood built it out of leftover bread dough and whatever sat in the cupboard, and nobody has bothered to make it fancier since.

Volunteers at St. Anthony of Padua, now a worship site of the Basilica of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel parish, sell the pizzas on Saturdays from September to June, working the ovens in the school kitchen next door.

Orders come in by phone Wednesday through Friday.

The first volunteers reach the ovens by 4 in the morning, and one recent Saturday sent out 230 pizzas at $8 for a 12-inch.

8. Hungarian Hot Dogs

Tony Packo opened a Toledo lunch counter in 1932 and built it on a Hungarian sausage of beef, pork, and garlic.

Cooks quarter that sausage lengthwise and griddle it until the edges curl, then lay it in a white bun under chopped onion, mustard, and Packo's meat sauce.

A Hungarian hot dog cost a nickel during the Depression.

Jamie Farr grew up in Toledo, and while he played Cpl. Klinger on M*A*S*H, he worked Tony Packo's into the script seven times.

Viewers heard the name for years and still couldn't tell you what a Hungarian hot dog was.

The food stayed home.

Burt Reynolds autographed a hot dog bun there in the early 1970s, and celebrities have been signing them ever since.

Close to 4,000 signed foam buns hang on the walls of Tony Packo's now.

9. Trail Bologna

Trail is an unincorporated speck in Holmes County, in the middle of Ohio's Amish country.

Michael Troyer bought a meat market there in 1912, and the company carrying his name still turns out roughly 25,000 pounds of all-beef ring bologna a week.

Nobody cooks it.

You buy a ring, cut it thick, lay a slice on a cracker with a slab of Swiss from the cheese house down the road, and that's lunch on a Saturday.

Grocery store bologna doesn't taste the same afterward.

10. Shredded Chicken Sandwiches

Church basements, fire hall fundraisers, and county fairs across central Ohio run on shredded chicken sandwiches.

Cooks pull the meat apart, bind it with crushed crackers and a can of cream of chicken soup, and hold it hot in a roaster all afternoon.

It falls apart on purpose.

Ohioans eat them at ball games, at church suppers, and at graduation open houses, usually off a paper plate that's soaked through.

Other Midwestern states put out a version, though a chicken sandwich almost anywhere else means a fried fillet on a bun.

11. Cassata Cake

In Cleveland, a cassata cake is sponge cake soaked in syrup, layered with custard and whipped cream, and loaded with fresh strawberries.

Bakery cases fill with them all summer, and Cleveland couples have been ordering them as wedding cakes for decades.

The name came from Sicily.

Nothing else about the cake did, and those strawberries would puzzle anybody who learned the word in Palermo.

Clevelanders don't treat it as a variation, since a cassata has always looked like this in their bakery boxes.